As he referred to ‘your people’ she saw Bernard, Ambrose and herself in the Molly Club, sitting around making policy recommendations for His Majesty’s government et al.
He seemed to be raising these points as if they were not really his views. Was he fishing to see precisely where she stood?
‘I understand that’s what your report is saying. Don’t misunderstand me.’
She added determinedly, ‘And this new development involves people other than the Jews.’
‘Who does it involve other than the Jews? I don’t think you identified the other groups?’
Her man at the FO had become curious.
‘Politicals and others. People designated socially undesirable by the Nazis.’
There was a brief silence at his end. ‘I see.’
She heard a sound from the other end which she could not interpret. Maybe it was the telephone cable.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have muddied the report by raising, however obliquely, the question of the others.
She could not interpret his ‘I see’. Maybe the fate of the socially undesirable did not concern him.
His voice came back on the line. ‘It doesn’t seem to gel with the facts of a war economy. To murder part of your labour force. Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding? Maybe it’s the use of these people as slave labour your source is talking about?’
‘Perhaps it’s not a normal government we’re dealing with here. We’ve certainly had other evidence that it’s not a rational government.’
She decided to ask a question which she knew was undiplomatic for her to ask, and to which she could hardly expect an answer, but she felt she had to ask, even if it made her sound inexperienced, a trifle green. ‘Have you received other reports of this nature at the FO?’
This time the extended silence came from his end.
The silence meant yes.
She was elated.
He cleared his throat. ‘I’m not authorised to say.’
‘Of course.’
His voice was low but still comradely. ‘If that’s all, we should close this conversation.’
‘Thank you.’
Before he hung up, he said, ‘There is another thing. On a personal note?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know Ambrose Westwood, I believe?’
He sounded tentative.
She was surprised. ‘I do. Yes.’
‘I understand he’s still over there in Geneva?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you tell him hello from Allan. He’ll know who I am.’
‘I will do that. And thank you, Allan.’
‘He’s well?’ he asked, as if reluctant to end the conversation.
‘Very well.’
‘Good. Still working with IFIS?’
‘No. He works independently now. For the League, indirectly.’
‘Good.’ His voice changed even more to the tone of an ally. ‘You know, I felt I had to put to you some of the positions floating around the FO—as background to your thinking. So that you wouldn’t expect too much to happen here, at our end. You do understand? Things you might run up against?’
‘Of course.’
He’d been briefing her.
‘Goodbye and good luck, Edith.’
‘Goodbye, good luck, Allan.’
They finished the call.
Well, well, well. An Ambrose connection. And this Allan was, after all, on their side. She felt that Allan’s remarks meant their report would now certainly go to Eden.
She’d done it—she’d made the call.
And now had yet further confirmation—unspoken but indisputable—that this Dieter had been telling the truth. They had assessed him correctly.
There was little more she or any of them could do now, apart from the forged visas plan.
They’d done all they could.
Fired all their shots. She hoped Voltaire was right that ‘Dieu n’est pas pour les gros bataillons, mais pour ceux qui tirent le mieux.’ God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.
Forget God.
She had done the best shooting that she could.
Back at the apartment she told Ambrose that she had a surprise for him.
‘Which is?’
‘I spoke with a friend of yours today. In London.’
‘In London?’
‘At the FO.’
‘At the FO, no less? You made the call to Eden?’
‘Oh yes, him too,’ she said casually. ‘I spoke with Anthony on a range of matters.’
She knew Ambrose was dying to hear what Eden had said.
‘But I also spoke with one of your old flames.’
‘And how did you know it was an old flame, as you put it?’
He was only just restraining himself from asking about Eden.
She smiled. ‘By the fey little note in his voice.’
‘And what was his name?’
‘Allan.’
She watched him. His face brightened. ‘You spoke with Allan?’
‘He was the officer designated to take our report.’
‘He was? And how did my name come into the report? I thought you were planning to use your name and fudge in the League?’
‘I didn’t bring in your name. He asked after you—outright—at the end of it all.’
‘He did? He’s a good man. And you spoke to Eden?’
‘Allan asked after your health.’ She was enjoying her teasing.
‘Tell me about Eden.’
‘Allan seemed very concerned about you.’
‘Edith! Tell me about Eden. You did speak with him?’
‘Yes, well, no.’ She looked back on the telephone call and how it had been handled. ‘I did talk with him—briefly. But in the end I suppose, I talked with a minion. Allan. Allan Minion.’
‘He’s a biggish minion.’
‘As big as me?’
‘You might be the bigger minion. Go on, tell all.’
She then gave him the full story. ‘And Allan took down our proposals for action, although he conveyed to me that the attitudes around the FO were somewhat against them.’
He made her go back over the telephone call.
When they’d both looked at it from every point of view, he said, ‘It seems to have gone well.’
‘We’ve done as much as we can at that end.’
She asked about the forged visa plan.
He said, ‘You realise there’s a limit to the number of those we can possibly manufacture and get away with without being caught out?’
‘That means we’ll have to select to whom we give them. Maybe we should just go to the border and hand them out? Maybe that’s the fair way.’
‘Or we could see that our friends and connections get them first.’
‘What ghastly decisions.’
‘And if we get them here to Switzerland, we’ll have to keep them alive. I suppose Field and the Unitarians or one of the other welfare funds would help. The Jews do have their own organisations and their own plans. We’ll have to look after the others.’
‘Field seems to favour certain politicals and not others.’
Was everyone just looking after their own? What rules were they working with now?
Ambrose then said, ‘Well done, Edith. Well done.’ He rose and came over, took her hands, and knelt before her chair. ‘Well done. Only you could’ve done it.’
She thought, sadly, that what she’d done was to shift the responsibility to Eden. It was not quite action.
And in reality, all they’d done so far was to save this man Dieter.
Not How Long But How Wide
The war rolled on. Switzerland lived in a nervous normality wondering if the Germans would consider them worth the effort of invasion. The citizen army still manned the anti-aircraft guns and roadblocks but became casual about it and played cards and sometimes sunbaked, their identity tags glittering in the summer sun.
All Europe was at war around them but t
he citizens of Geneva, despite their nervousness, shopped, wined and dined and took vacations.
At night on the BBC world service they heard of the nightly bombing of Germany, the grinding up of the German army in Russia and the consensus of opinion was that the Germans could not continue to sustain such losses, although there was an irrational fear that, some way, somehow, they might be invincible.
Because of the closing of Switzerland’s borders, the Council and the Assembly couldn’t meet. The members of the Supervisory Commission, scattered through a number of countries, made key decisions by cable or telephone with Lester in Geneva.
Jacklin managed the League treasury from London.
Money for the budget came mainly from Britain, the British Empire, and the neutral countries, although Switzerland, frightened of offending the Germans, had stopped paying its dues.
The Swiss also closed the League radio station and stopped the League printing its own postage stamps.
This saddened them all, because these were some of the ways of showing the League flag, showing that it was still there waiting in the wings to bring about a peace.
But at least the Swiss hadn’t thrown them out or taken over the Palais as a hospital.
The staff at the Palais were down to about thirty, mostly working from the Library, with another seventy-odd guards, cleaners and clerks.
Walters and most of the haute direction had gone but Aghnides and Vigier stayed on to give support to Lester in his role as Acting Secretary-General.
Bartou retired and Edith found herself working more closely with Lester.
With Lester’s blessing and encouragement, Ambrose, while still employed by her as a personal assistant, moved in with the Library group and looked after the work she would have done in normal times. Everyone was doing more work to fill the gaps made by the staff who’d left.
The skeleton Secretariat tried to keep some of the journals going, they tried to keep the statistical work up-to-date and many countries, even though at war, dutifully sent in their figures on literacy, iron ore production, VD cases, and so on.
Even the Germans still sent in some statistics. Clerks here and there in the German bureaucracy probably had it as their job from before the war and had not received instructions to do otherwise.
Maybe the clerks just assumed that the League belonged to them. Maybe some clerks saw it as an act of defiance against their Nazi masters.
After Pétain’s Vichy government withdrew France from the League, Lester made contact with the French government-in-exile in London under General de Gaulle, and de Gaulle declared that the withdrawal of France from the League by the Pétain government was not valid and that France ‘continued as a member of the League’.
With written approval from the Council members, Lester accepted de Gaulle as the true authority of France.
It was the League’s only political act during this strange isolated time.
Lester’s daughter, Ann, had used her neutral Irish passport to get into Geneva to be with her father and Edith had found her work around the office. Ann, helped by Edith, became the official hostess at La Pelouse for the little diplomatic social life that still existed, although they had closed off the main part of the mansion to save on upkeep costs.
The rare social occasions slowly drank away the official wine cellar.
Fearing overnight invasion and capture, Lester began a secret diary which he hid in the garden. Edith and Ann were the only two who knew its location.
Jeanne became increasingly depressed and withdrawn as her country collaborated with the Germans, yet she felt that the world had let France down. Any criticism made of France by Edith or others was resented as being easy to say for those who were not there under the Nazis. Even criticism of the rounding up of the Jewish people in France to be sent to concentration camps in Germany was brushed aside by Jeanne.
‘You are not there,’ she would say. ‘We don’t know how it is to be there.’
And she was bitter about the Allied bombing of Paris, even if mostly of railway lines and factories.
But, along with her compatriot, Vigier, she remained with the League although the Intellectual Cooperation Section, with its offices in Paris, had gone. She opted to stay doing menial clerical work rather than leave the League.
As a personal rule she would not eat bananas or oranges because they were not available to the French people.
She remained a member of the gang but without her old exuberance. And sometimes, when Edith and her eyes met, Edith wondered about what might have happened between them if they’d been women with slightly stronger unconventional tastes. And if she hadn’t found Ambrose.
Of all of them she felt closest to Jeanne, but this was now rarely expressed.
Victoria worked on at the Red Cross and tried to believe that good administrative work was, itself, a work of compassion, as much as applying bandages to wounds.
‘Of course it is,’ Edith agreed. ‘But we find it hard to feel it that way. Maybe as women we feel a need to be out there in the battlefield tending the wounded.’
‘If we are not permitted to fight and not good at bandaging, at least we can administer. And anyhow, it takes ten people behind the lines to keep one person fighting. Or eight by some counts. But don’t hold me to either of those figures.’
Cards from Robert were very rare. She had lost track of him. But from time to time she thought about how she could have made such a mistake of judgement about such an important matter in her life. It continued to shake her confidence about her close relations with men and her assessments of them.
She sometimes wondered if her employing Ambrose was a way of having a relationship in which she had more control, if it were a way of setting up of an arrangement, other than marriage, which she could understand.
The Molly Club prospered as refugees made their way legally or illegally into Geneva.
When the Swiss tightened border restrictions, especially against the Jews, quite a few midnight border crossings from France through the Jura mountains ended with hot coffee, cognac and rolls in the Molly Club.
Edith noticed that the Club was never raided by the Swiss police. When she mentioned this to Bernard, he told her that the Club was protected by a couple of highly placed civil servants in the Swiss federal government and the canton. ‘They sometimes come here—you can recognise them—they have the most expensive frocks.’
He added, ‘If the Germans get control of Switzerland then we will expect changes.’ He sighed. ‘All that leather and black shining boots.’
As the war went on she sometimes saw Bernard’s high-pitched, extravagant public mask slip and a more serious and harried self showed through the make-up and from behind the elegant costumes of his Club persona.
He studied and got to know every newcomer who came through the doors.
He kept on with the Club’s satirical cabaret and because some of the arrivals from Europe were from the entertainment world, the standard of the cabaret, in fact, rose and the cabaret attracted a much wider crowd although the Club was never advertised. And it had become somewhat more scandalous as well. Ambrose was still an occasional stand-in chorus girl.
One day, she received a call from Lester. When she was inside his office, Lester locked the outer door and closed the inner door and asked her in a conspiratorial way about her connection with the Molly Club.
She was a little surprised that he knew of her links with the Club but she supposed she’d mentioned it over the years or perhaps Ambrose had talked about it in passing.
‘I have been there,’ she said. ‘Ambrose and I are friends with Bernard Follett who runs it.’
She felt herself colour slightly. Edith, at your age, really.
‘I have a vague idea of what sort of club it is,’ Lester said, showing discomfort. She wondered what he knew about what went on there. And what he imagined.
Surely he wasn’t going to reprimand her for conduct unbecoming to an officer of the League?
&n
bsp; Those days were long gone. It had to be something else.
She sat poised with attention.
‘I have a favour to ask,’ Lester said.
Edith fleetingly entertained the risqué thought that maybe Lester had been separated from his wife for too long and needed ‘company’, but she would never have conceived that he would have sought the company that the Molly offered.
Who’s to know? More likely he might want tickets for the cabaret show. But even that seemed unlikely.
‘Of course, Sean, anything you ask—if it’s in my capacity—anything—you know that.’
Oh. Had that come out sounding odd? She stopped herself from adding, ‘and anything you ask will be held in confidence’.
Lester was trying to find the words for his request.
She waited.
‘I am not a man who finds this easy,’ he said.
She tried not to raise her eyebrows.
She continued to wait patiently for him to get the words together.
He came out with it—‘I believe that certain things can be found there which are not readily available elsewhere in Geneva?’
That otherwise unobtainable things could be found at the Molly was certainly true. Perhaps he wanted a pistol? But the Secretariat had a small armoury of pistols for their guards and, at one time, for those senior officials who felt the need of such self-protection. Sean could have signed one of those pistols out.
It crossed her mind to find out who was now officially in charge of the armoury and where the keys were. Who was taking care of that?
Did he want suicide tablets? There had been a brisk trade in those, she’d been told. But he was not the sort of man to suicide, and he had a family back in Ireland. Morphine?
She looked at him, ‘You would need to be a little more specific, Sean.’
‘Of course.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You know of the Irish writer, James Joyce?’
‘I have read his book Ulysses. Something of a cause célèbre. He has a growing reputation, although more for his notoriety and the difficulty of his writing.’
‘If you’ve read Ulysses, you are better read than I. All I can say is that I have tried to read Ulysses. Will leave it until after the war. But I did review one of his other books favourably several years ago. Sadly he has no reputation of a good kind in Ireland.’
Dark Palace Page 53
